A theme that’s been coming up in my conversations recently (including when visiting UC Davis) is the question of the “humanities canon”: i.e., who are the theorists whose views have been most influential in shaping the humanities disciplines, especially over the last century or so? And more specifically, is there anything approximating an “environmental humanities canon,” and who are its key theorists?
I’ll leave the second question for later. As for the first, an easy place to start is with a simple Google Scholar search for some of the most commonly cited humanists of the last century.
Is there any question about who will top that list? For me there wasn’t. (Drumroll coming.) But after first place, there were some surprises.
A few caveats:
The list does not distinguish between theoretical works and other kinds of writings (literary, popular, et al.) except insofar as Google Scholar already does that. So Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose counts alongside his semiotic writings. Nor does it distinguish between the names listed in book titles as opposed to books for which the named individual is the author. (For instance, “Adolf Hitler” results in “about 89,000 results,” but it’s likely that most of these are books about Hitler rather than books he authored.)
The numbers following the names refer to the number of “results” listed for the entire name — first and last name contained in quote marks, e.g., “Edward Said,” even if this refers to a book entitled The Things Edward Said.
Numbers in square brackets indicate the exact cite number for scholars with Google Scholar “user profiles.”
Note that some results are a little perplexing: for instance, Thomas Kuhn’s book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” has 70,362 citations, but the name “Thomas Kuhn” only delivers “about 52,900 results.” I’m guessing this is because some of the “Structure” citations list his name as “T. S. Kuhn” or something else.
Finally, there are names I might not have searched for. If you think of any, search their name on Google Scholar and, if they beat Judith Butler, let me know who they are (in the comments section). The loose rule is that they both published books in the 20th century (and/or 21st) and lived well into that century.
There are, of course, some whose lives ended before that century began, but whose publications swelled well into our time period. If Karl Marx were allowed on the list, he’d win — with 582,000 results. Kant (180,000) and Shakespeare (125,000) would also be up there in the top 10.
I’ve also indicated any individual books (by these theorists) with more than 30,000 citations.
The winner? Of course it’s Michel Foucault. (I’ll leave aside the fact that some consider him an “anti-humanist,” or a “post-humanist.” Or that he’d be more interested in how the category of “the humanities” emerged than in who wins a popularity contest within it.)
- Michel Foucault 394,000 [447,638] (Discipline and Punish, 41,036; History of Sexuality Vol. 2, 30,641)
- Sigmund Freud 291,000
- Pierre Bourdieu 188,000 [338,987] (Distinction 30,625)
- John Dewey 163,000
- Jacques Derrida 129,000 [144,342]
- Hannah Arendt 125,000
- Roland Barthes 99,900
- Marin Heidegger 87,700
- John Rawls 82,700 (A Theory of Justice 48,566)
- Jean Piaget 82,100
- Jean-Paul Sartre 74,800
- Jacques Lacan 74,600
- Gilles Deleuze 66,200
- Ludwig Wittgenstein 64,900
- Amartya Sen 63,900
- Karl Popper 63,400
- Edward Said 62,500
- Noam Chomsky 59,400
- Anthony Giddens 57,100
- Jurgen Habermas 54,700
- Umberto Eco 53,300
- Thomas Kuhn 52,900 (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 70,362)
- Clifford Geertz 51,200 [108,214] (Interpretation of Cultures 32,782)
- Judith Butler 51,200
And here’s another list to cross-check this one against:
Times Higher Ed Most Cited Authors in the Humanities list (2007)
Thought of another one already: Bertrand Russell (75,200).
And I note that in the week and a half since I did most of my counts, many of the numbers have gone up. Just you try to catch up.
The Times published this list for 2007 (i.e. only counting citations for that year):
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/405956.article
Presumably they did some cleaning with regard to the naming issues you mention above.
Oh shoot, as I posted that I saw that you’d linked to it right at the end of your post! Ignore me.
I’ve just announced a prize for the top namer of “names that should be on this list.” Deadline is next Sunday at midnight E.S.T. And Scu at Critical Animal is in the lead with 3: Walter Benjamin, Emile Durkheim, and Antonio Gramcsi. That’s an unfair advantage — the competition was first announced on Facebook — but you have a week to beat it.
And let’s make the rules slightly less ambiguous. The scholars listed must have published at least one significant work of largely humanistic scholarship after 1900 and must have lived beyond the year 1914 (to make them “of our past century”).
That means Emile Durkheim qualifies, but barely: his “Elementary Forms of the Religious Life” came out in 1912, and he lived until 1917. Most would consider him to be a social scientist rather than a humanities scholar, but since he wrote about religion and on philosophical topics (even Wikipedia calls him a “philosopher,” and since we’re using GoogleScholar, why not Wikipedia? — as long as he’s called that before this competition began), he qualifies. By contrast, William James (who died in 1910) does not.
But feel free to list people like James, if only for our edification. He’d be very close to the top at 377,000.
Posting on behalf of Scu:
Walter Benjamin (128,000)
Emile Durkheim (73,000)
Antonio Gramsci (57,200)
I thought about the objections to Durkheim based on his being principally an anthropologist or sociologist, but I figured if Pierre Bourdieu made the list, we were basically dealing with anyone working in softer side of the human sciences of the social sciences.
Quick, somebody mention the other German… Not Durkheim, not Marx, but, yes, that guy…
Maybe the real question here is: how far back can we date this thing while ensuring that Foucault wins? (Or how far back do we need to go to beat Foucault?)
Yeah, Max Weber was a pretty big oversight on my part, and he beats Foucault, wow.
Now that we’ve got Durkheim and Weber, we ought to include Talcott Parsons as well. He comes in at 51,400 [95.462]. The good news is that Judith Butler has risen to 53,200 since I did the original count (about two weeks ago), so he doesn’t quite cut it. Others have risen as well: Eco 55,300, Kuhn 54,300, Geertz 53,500, and so on up the list. I ascribe this to GoogleScholar’s growth over the last couple of weeks. (Unless someone has an alternative explanation?)
Note, however, that if we opened the list up to poets and literati — which is what the term “humanist” is often taken to mean — as well as to political and religious leaders, then there would be plenty of other names to choose from, e.g.:
John F Kennedy (154,000)
Martin Luther King (149,000)
T S Eliot (108,000)
Adolf Hitler (90,500)
Winston Churchill (75,200)
But let’s not go there.
I discovered this one this morning, but I didn’t want to bring it up to give someone else the chance, but Stuart Hall seems to make the cut at 52,900. Though, with Butler’s increase, maybe he didn’t make the cut when you first were putting together the list?
It’s a moving bar — now at 53,200 for Butler. But that’s good news about Hall. And in fact he gets 53,900 when I do the search. Could he have already gone up over night, or are we discovering some quirk in Google Scholar where different locations (or something) get different results?
I guess we’ll use the results on Sunday at midnight (end of the day, going on Monday) as the final arbiter. So you’re either at 3 or at 4 depending on what happens between now and then with Butler and Hall. A commanding lead, I’d say.
I think I figured out the different number with Stuart Hall, at least. I didn’t have “include patents” turned on. When I do that, I get the same number as you. But I don’t know why the other numbers keep changing.
Weird… Including patents adds 1000 to Hall’s figure, but *takes away* 800 from Butler’s. Bizarre. I’m afraid it makes more sense to exclude patents for these. That puts Butler ahead. It also puts Foucault at 405,000 (and 414,000 now *with* patents; makes me interested to know what sorts of patents Michel Foucault or his name have been responsible for…).
B. F. Skinner 85,077
Congrats to Scu for the three names! (Benjamin, Durkheim, Gramsci. Stuart Hall is barely edged out by Butler, so he doesn’t quite make the cut. Send me your mailing address, Scu; the book will be on its way soon.)
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